As Simple As ABC
I thought I had died and gone to food heaven when my classmate Chin Leong invited me to stay at his home in Penang. Every day I was there, we went on a walk, stop and eat tour of the island. We went to Penang Hill. We went to the snake temple and many other tourist spots and at the end of each day, I would have eaten at least 3 bowls of laksa, a few pieces of grilled cuttlefish, 2 plates of char kway teow and a bowl or 2 of Hokkien mee for supper - all at roadside stalls, all of which couldn’t have gotten a D grading from our world class NEA.
Someone once joked that in Singapore, the standard of a hawker’s food is inversely proportional to the hygiene grading. I prefer to judge food quality by the rudeness of the hawker. But food hygiene is definitely no joking matter nowadays. Two people have died after eating some contaminated Indian rojak. Unlike anti-suicide barriers at MRT stations, the response to food poisoning deaths was swift.
Yes, the heat is on at hawker centres. Food hygiene is a major issue these days. To show how major it is, 80 out of 83 stalls in Geylang Serai had their hawker hygiene grading downgraded to C.
That’s interesting. But why C? Why not D? Why only 80/83 stalls? Why not all 83 stalls? Regardless of whether the stalls are “downgraded” to C or D overnight, people still need to eat and they are certainly smart enough to know that their chances of getting food poisoning at these familiar but “downgraded” stalls would not be any higher than before. The only “effective” thing about this downgrading exercise is that if anyone gets food poisoning at Geyland Serai, he can’t blame the NEA for being mistaken about the standard of stall cleanliness there.
What next? Compulsory continuing education on food hygiene for our hawkers? That’s easy to implement. What’s not so easy is for the hawkers themselves to take time off to attend these courses and keep their prices low. They may need to start looking for locums too. What’s even more difficult, is for the governing body to vouch for a hawker who has completed all his hygiene courses, judiciously implemented state of the art hygiene measures at his stall and still ends up with customers in hospital. It’s not wrong to make the hawkers take ultimate responsibilty for the safety of their own food, but if I were a hawker, I would feel a stab in my back if my stall’s cleanliness is instantly downgraded when something happens nearby.
The most reputable brand of electronics can explode. The most skillful surgeon can make mistakes on or off the operating table. Athletic people collapse and die for no apparent reason. Self-sacrificing monks can lend $50,000 in charity funds to their boyfriends. A stall that has been doing brisk business for decades may have a fatal food poisoning case. We live in an imperfect world. Accidents will happen no matter how careful you are. While it’s only right that we mourn the unfortunate people who died, taking drastic measures to prevent such things from ever happening again will not only be futile, but will make Singapore even more uniquely dull, sterile and unforgiving. I’m not a foolhardy person (and I certainly won’t tolerate a cockroach in my har gow), but I still need to live on and enjoy life. Bring on the good stuff.
